Phone Scan !!!

I have been using Evernote on my phone for a few years now to store images of documents that I needed to archive, and it has great features to convert these into pdf documents and convert to text (OCR). Then I cam across an App called CamScan. This remained my favorite app and I considered it to be the most useful app I had on my phone. It did, and still does a wonderful job of converting captured images of documents into perfectly pdf files, by straightening the skewed images which is a result of phone camera not being perfectly parallel to the document being photographed. However, one limitation that bothered me was that it has a subscription based licensing model for full featured app, and at some point started adding an ink mark, rather a full colored logo on the scanned document which sort of was a way to (Ahem!) force  people to go for the paid subscription. In mu quest to find an equally good free app, I started searching around the app Market Place and found quite a few similar products with a wide range of good to bad reviews. And then by chance I came across an app that pretty much every smart phone (Android) comes pre-installed with, and other platforms (iOS and Windows) also had access to it. This is the Google Drive, when you click on the New icon (a plus sign inside a circle) in the lower right corner from within the Google Drive app, you get the options to create Folders, Google Docs/Slides/Sheets and Upload. Nestled besides these options is the option for Scan. Selecting the scan option open ups your camera and you can take a photo of your document which will be auto-corrected (unskewed, brightened and rotated) as a pdf document. You can save it or redo if the results are not to your liking. Also, you can add more pages to the same file if needed. Make sure you rename the file and select the correct location to save to. Not to be left out, Microsoft added similar feature to its OneDrive app. I will write a more detailed review of the three apps (CamScan, GoogleDrive Scan and OneDrive Scan) or will ask my sons to do that for me and post them here :).

OneDrive Scan

Google Drive Scan

CamScan

Business Intelligence - The Intro

BI Dashboard examples (Click to Enlarge)

Business Intelligence does not have a formal definition but the term is used for a variety of tools and activities used to analyze raw data and present it in a more meaningful and useful format for business analysis purposes.

The term Business Intelligence has been abbreviated to BI and is used alternatively. We will stick to using the abbreviated form BI for representing Business Intelligence in all our Articles, Blogs, Guides and Forums.

BI provides current performance status in relation to past performance and predictive  future views, and provides the target users (business leadership) the ability to modify (slice and dice) and dive deeper (drill down) or summarize (drill up) information. The data becomes even more useful when a comparison to industry specific benchmarks is incorporated.

BI helps organizational leadership to make informed decisions and take calculated risks in both operational and strategic spheres. KPI's can be established and performance can be measured against those. Performance Indicators breaching preset thresholds utilizing easy to read and at-a-glance visuals, can lead to further digging (slicing/dicing and drilling) into the data.



BI information is generally represented as Dashboards, which are collections of related visuals and reports, providing an at-a-glance . Raw data is converted into an OLAP cube. OLAP stands for Online Analytical Processing, which may be defined as a computer based technique for analyzing data and providing insights. Cube is used to define a mutli-dimensional data sets. traditionally a data set has two dimensions , rows and columns. OLAP cubes have more than two dimensions and those with more than three dimension are also sometimes refer to hypercubes. The advantage of cubes is the data is pre-processed and readily available for slicing, dicing and drilling, saving time compared to running queries in real-time against traditional relational data sets.